There are many useful applications for ferroelectric materials, which have the ability to achieve and maintain a high degree of polarization (e.g., alignment of the atomic or molecular dipoles that comprise the material) even in the absence of an external electric field. For example, highly polarized material may be used in computer memory cells. In such an application, metal electrode layers may be formed on a ferroelectric polymer layer.
Although sputter deposition may be generally used to form metal layers, sputtering does not typically work well when forming metal layers on ferroelectric polymer material due to the fact that conventional sputtering may cause ferroelectric property degradation, which may render the polymer useless.
One method of forming the metal electrode layers includes evaporation (e.g., by resistive heating) of the metal to form a metal layer on the ferroelectric polymer layer. However, evaporation of metal may not be reliably reproducible and may result in higher defect density within the metal layer, which may cause a lower yield for the process. Moreover, certain materials (e.g., intermetallics such as TiN, TaN, TiNSi, and TaNSi) may not be successfully deposited via metal evaporation.